EditorialJoe.com | A Hack You Know and Love

Every time I attempt to define myself, it’s a war of weird conflicting ideologies and expectations. Magic rituals share space with chemical systems. Literary creations speak in their own voices, chiding and praising the actions of their creator as he wanders through life. I bark like an old man about the glorious Halcyon days of which I was never a part, and in the same breath I cry injustice like a rabid youth demanding revolution.

These are soldiers of mental contradiction, my internal voices—balanced insomuch as our certainty is never guaranteed against our own numbers. I, the functional engineer, the singular entity defined however inaccurately by corpus as “Joe Callan”, represents my true self only as much as a nation’s president reflects his citizens.

The nation of thought underlying, if my linguistic vagaries be warranted in gross analogy, consists of ragged bands harboring both crusader and conscript, lining up to do battle for the what-we-do-not-know, fighting in righteous faith against the what-we-do-not-know-we-are.

Sower of confusion, then? Salesman of pithy language exhibited in a house of empty ideology? Tender of beautifully twisted lattices reaching, grasping skyward to a height unsound with their groundless, airy structures?

Possibly. (Likely, a voice inside corrects.)

This is a spledid definition! I much prefer it to the certainty of loyal members in any partisan granfalloon, be they fish in the pond of politic, lambs in the meadow of faith, or tiny model soldiers in their own right, affixed to platforms of plastic or tin and forever unable to make any step forward without their master placing them so.

Every fool thinks their own mental morals and laws are based on logic, but the logic whereby men cite their own thinking as “logic”—which reaches conclusions without the cosmopolitan head to know that the “logic” cited by their peers may arrive at conclusions incongruent with their own—is no type of critical thought, but a mess of twisted psychological pseudocalculus brimming with justifications to maintain its own status quo.

Let the mess sprawl, I say, but know the mess thyself. See the mess as a mess, not the Eden with which you intend to calibrate the lenses of every Adam, Eve, and beast as if your thoughts were the gift of life everlasting to your peers. Stand with your peers—we, the blind, deaf, and haptically paralyzed students on the plane of eternal ignorance. Seal yourself not in a chamber of certainty, but set your consuming corpus—this lens of all material interaction—free to its naiveté.

Playing teetotaller to the unknown makes for a boring final commencement amongst your internal congress. Failing to act on the fear that some make-believe aspect of one’s own mental record might suffer a temporary loss of dignity is the most foolish act of all; in bearing of the rotten flesh all the dead tales that cannot be told for a lack of fortitude in life, the part of the greater community memory (which we here call a “soul” for no other purpose but to which the otherwise-holy word invokes) suffers a greater blow to dignity, in that a single cell of its billions failed to record and relay that which another may have been spared in the way of tragedy, or augmented in the way of triumph.

And so when conclusions come at the eve of this attempt, the “definition” I seek is as elusive as at once we began. What gains, then?

Is not the “elusive” quality itself a brand of definition? Is not the lack of certainty a sign of maturation, a few hairs on the chin of youth so often stupefied with drunkenness by the fumes of certitude dancing off the breath of their every word?

And what of these wordy stilts, speaking to the audience in a heighty-mighty tone as if to say: “Soak me up with your eyes! Look at what wonders I can weave while your ears fail to follow! The tapestry you attempt to see is not so incomplete as the lens through which you attempt to see it! Masters of the word, sentence, and paragraph, I!”

A mistake of perception. In truth, they mean to say that they mean nothing. They paint the canvas wildly, coating nearly every space with a rambunctious palette of painful, arguing colors—not so that the audience can gaze upon the skill with which the media was placed, nor the genius that the tortured artist so wishes to express, but instead to see, for the first time—the spaces of the canvas unspoiled by demented artist or jaded lens, those empty areas through which “nothingness” becomes rare and beautiful, those cells of experience through which the serenity of the unbuilt becomes a life of possibility all its own.

I cannot define myself because I have no other self by which to compare myself against.

Yet the voice inside has the final word, reminding this “Joe Callan”—president of this thought nation (in which his power is no more absolute over constituent thoughts than the leader in a nation of human beings is over its constituent citizens)—that the words “no other self” can just as easily be replaced by “infinite selves”.

Shattered familiarity with these thoughts. Their lack of subjection by the mysterious and cruel lord known as “sense” comforts me in that, if a man who speaks of “logic” admits that he cannot place his own overabundant thoughts in the pantheon of sense, neither can he expect to inter nor exile the thoughts of others.

Nations of thought, we individuals—divisible by our conclusions, divisible by our reasons, divisible by our expectations, and divisible by our perceptions of our thoughts’ perceptions, if we should care to take audience among the countless tiny citizens within.